It was late October, 1980, and Ronald Reagan was running for president. Candidate for the Senate Arlen Specter honored my service to his camaign by seating me to the right of former president Gerald Ford at a fund raising event in King of Prussia. The event came towards the end of the successful campaign.
The first thing I said upon introducing myself was “President Ford, I would like to personally thank you for your courageous pardon of Richard Nixon. It may have cost you the presidency.” He responded that it “needed to be done because otherwise the country would have torn itself apart.”
The president of Liberty Mutual Insurance company was seated to Ford’s left but he spent much of the time over a lengthily dinner chatting with me about national and world affairs.
I expressed my concerns whether Reagan would be intellectually equal to the challenge of the presidency. Ford opined that he would do fine so long as he kept James Baker as his chief advisor. I was not familiar with Baker at the time; but we all sure became so over the two decades to follow, including as Chief-0f-Staff to Reagan, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of State and in 2000 , when he led the effort to make certain that George W. Bush was declared winner of the Florida primary and president-elect. (That’s another story for my memoirs.)
Representative of the character of Gerald Ford was the following: The waiter asked if I could obtain the former president’s autograph for his son who was in the army and would soon be headed overseas. When I passed along the request to Ford, he asked that I obtain the full name of the soldier. He then wrote a note to him wishing him well.
To Ford this was simply routine decency.
There has been a considerable retrospection concerning the Ford presidency. When they were competing for the Republican nominatin in 1976, Reagan had suggested Ford, an intercollegiate football star, had played to many games without a helmet. Many historians now laud Ford for creating a very positive environment for exchange of views among his advisors, often remaining silent until everyone else had spoken. He is now highly respected by prominent historians.
However he made a gaffe during a 1976 election campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, in which he stated that Poland should not be lumped in with all the other Soviet satellite nations. It was a problem of knowing too much and then, having blurted it out, not being able to explain what he meant for national security reasons. This was another indication of his integrity.
Of course he was thinking of the turmoil and loosening of controls that already was being manifested in that nation, which led in 1989 – just nine years later – to Polish leadership in the collapse of the Soviet empire. The public interpreted his comment as is being ignorant of foreign affairs which could not have been further from the truth.
I regret very much that during a recent office move my files on the Specter campaign were discarded…or at least misplaced. Otherwise I could provide a far more detailed account of our conversation.
It took me a couple days to come down from the extraordinary high of having dined in such a congenial manner with a former president. It still remains one of the thrills of a lifetime.
